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Poetry

All the Good Things That I Know

by Robert Frazier

First and foremost that dizzying slip slide
When a temponaut starts to shift elsewhen.

Back, say, to a sailor’s impromptu kiss with a nurse,
Just a tiny pulse in the maelstrom of V-J Day 1945.

Then 70,000 B.C. to a nomadic band of Neanderthals
Greeting sapient cousins with meaningful gestures.

Reverse to an 868 A.D. printing of Diamond Sutra,
Forerunner to the free knowledge within books.

Back to the Cretaceous tipping point when a quarter
Of all life somehow survives the Chicxulub asteroid.

Then zip to the hours before your crash when I
Hold you under a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower.

Yet once has little meaning when I can revisit
My/our significant moments over and over.

And returning from yesteryear to the present
Means forward into an unreadable future.

For the most part time seems the blind guide,
While the living and the dead travel as one.

Featured Poet of the Month Robert Frazier

My father taught cryptography for Army Security after working with Turing’s bombe at Bletchley Park during WWII. My mother was an oil painter who studied with Emile Albert Gruppé in Rockport. The science of deciphering gibberish into plain text somehow meshes with impressionistic imagery in my writing. I live on Nantucket Island with my wife, Karol Lindquist, a nationally recognized basketmaker, while my daughter, Timalyne, was a graduate of Clarion West in 1995 (I was at Clarion ‘80). I am the author of nine books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award. I have published over one hundred poems in Asimov’s.

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